What challenge projects are:

Experienced researchers can post "Challenges" to get help solving a specific problem and aid the researcher in carrying out a larger study. Challenges are a special subset of Project pages, which will be highlighted prominently. Challenge projects: a) have significant scientific value, and b) follow guidelines that will make it easier and more enjoyable for both the challenger and other participants.

Researchers posing challenges:

Will be able to use the wiki to solve problems, with a format giving clear lines of authorship and contribution.

Have a tool to find collaborators outside their professional network, including skilled non-scientists, amateurs, and others.

Gain a new way to make their work have a broader impact on society.

Users who help solve challenge projects will:

Get to use their creativity and skills to advance significant, original research.

Be able to interact with people with shared interests, including the scientist who posed the challenge.

Get an entry point for research, by having a discrete problem to solve.

Proposing challenges:

Challenges are meant to help researchers take a step towards completing a substantial, original scientific study, leading to publication. Therefore challengers must demonstrate that they can publish scientific papers. This could mean having a position where publication is part of the job (e.g. faculty, graduate students, or other researchers at reputable institutions). But, it could also mean having already published a couple of papers in reputable scientific journals. So, amateurs who have published scientific papers before are encouraged to propose challenges too.

Create a project page with background information explaining the nature of the challenge, and how it fits into answering a larger research question.

Add a comment on your project page describing:

Who you are.

How users should contact you.

Any policies you might have for project participation (see below).

How long the challenge will last.

Anything else you feel participants should know.

Contact us to tell us that you want to be included on the list of challenges, and include the project link. We will decide whether to may request further information or improvements before listing it.

Provide feedback to contributors. You'll want to monitor the page, and adjust Page Watching settings so that you can get emails if/when people comment or make changes.

At the end:
If the challenge project is successful:
• Thank the participants.
• Edit the page to show that the problem was solved (and ideally explain how).
• Let us know so we can block further page editing.

If the challenge is not finished in the time you allotted, decide whether you want to continue it. If so, let us know. Otherwise, it may be archived with editing blocked, unless you reopen it.

Challenges should be discrete problems, and challengers should explain what would constitute solving the problem.

Challenges should be a step towards a potential publication as part of a larger study. Obviously, publication is never guaranteed, but challengers should be serious about wanting the solution to benefit their research.

Challenge problems should require users' creativity and intellect. Projects might involve designing a device, developing a computer program/algorithm, figuring out a practical protocol for volunteer data collection, even mathematical modeling (there are lots of hobbyist mathematicians), and many more. Other resources exist that would be more appropriate for crowd-sourcing manual image measurement/classification, computer processor power, etc. (e.g. http://crowdcrafting.org/ or https://www.zooniverse.org/ ).

Challengers should treat project participants as they would treat people they meet in professional circles. For example, if someone contributes enough that — if they were a colleague or student — you'd acknowledge them in your paper, then it would be polite to offer to do so; the same goes for co-authorship.

Challengers might want to tell participants if they can help provide resources to solve the challenge.

Consider adding policies for the page, for example:

Do you want people to ask you before participating (e.g. by editing or commenting on the page)?

Do you want people to contact you directly?

How many people can participate?

When is the challenge over? Provide a reasonable time window: long enough to solve the problem, but short enough that you will still be working on the topic.

Participating in challenges:

The default* is that anyone can participate in solving challenge projects, no matter what their experience level. *However, check the comments on the challenge's project page, and see what the challenger's specific policies say about who/how to participate.

There are lots of ways to get started. Here are several possibilities, starting with the easiest:

Provide encouragement by rating the project upwards.

Write a note of encouragement in the comments section of the page.

Ask questions in the comments section. If you do not understand the project, or something about it, questions can help the challenger and other users clarify it.

Post suggestions in the comments section. You can contribute new ideas without modifying the page itself by adding comments.

Edit text of the project page. You do not need to know wiki syntax, or have special skills/knowledge to help people clarify what they are saying. Check the policies for the specific challenge project first.

Add background information. You do not need to know wiki syntax to add text (and it's easy to learn the syntax for citations), and you don't need to do experiments to do literature research. Check the policies for the specific challenge project first.

Add new information: Try building devices, doing experiments, making models, etc., and describe your results in text. You can upload files, and write text without wiki syntax. Check the policies for the specific challenge project first.

With Wikidot's easy wiki language, you can add images, movies, tables, etc. directly on the page, formatted as you like to look clear and attractive. But, there are lots of things you can do just by writing regular text and attaching files, just like you would in an email. And you cannot mess things up: one can always revert to older versions of the page. For instructions on how to use the wiki syntax see IGoR's Editing Tips and FAQs, or Wikidot's help site. For memory limits on files, please see the FAQs.

What is IGoR's role in challenges?

IGoR's sole responsibility is to list challenge projects. It is solely the user's responsibility to decide whether participating in the challenge is appropriate to their skills, local laws, and safety concerns. Challengers' sole responsibility is posing a problem, the solution of which will advance their larger research aims; however, they should monitor their page and provide feedback to participants.